


Hotel Atlantis

by Siria



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, Community: mcsmooch, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-04-26
Updated: 2009-04-26
Packaged: 2017-10-03 20:32:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Monique Dupont was a Bridezilla: a thin, tanned redhead who was marrying old, Park Avenue money and wanted everyone to know it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hotel Atlantis

**Author's Note:**

> For Cate and Jenn.

Monique Dupont was a Bridezilla: a thin, tanned redhead who was marrying old, Park Avenue money and wanted everyone to know it. She brought both her mother and her future mother-in-law with her when they came to the view the Atlantis Hotel's wedding facilities, and John had been manning the reception desk for long enough by now to know trouble when he saw it. He slunk down a little in his seat and pretended to be very, very interested in the mound of paperwork and invoicing he'd been avoiding all morning, letting Chuck greet them and try to placate them and tell them that if only they'd take a seat, Mr McKay would be down to see them _very shortly_.

"I have an appointment," Monique said. Her voice lilted upwards, turning each sentence into a question; the monthly cost of maintaining the French manicured nails she was tapping quietly against the desk would probably pay the rent on John's walk-up. "And I don't appreciate being kept waiting, no matter how good this guy's centrepieces are."

"He's just taking a phone call right now," Chuck said, and John could see his Adam's apple bob; Chuck was a favourite with all the restaurant staff, the darling of housekeeping, but three months later and he still hadn't learned the knack of dealing with difficult customers. (John's method mostly involved a fixed smile and veiled sarcasm and counting down the days til the end of summer and classes started again.) "I'm sure he'll be right with you as soon as he's done."

John had been keeping an eye on the blinking lights of the switchboard, though, and had already spotted that the phone in Office 103 had gone out. He leaned back in his chair and counted down—two minutes to leave the office and head down the hallway to the service stairs; ninety seconds to make it down the steps; then through the door marked 'Private' and—

Rodney's suit was immaculate, his shoes polished to a high sheen, the manila folder in his left hand bulging with brochures and folders, and the iPhone in his right hand was buzzing with incoming messages. The only thing out of place was his hair, which was rumpled and hedgehoggy, as if he'd been running his hands through it: John figured that Rodney had been yelling at suppliers over the phone again.

"Well," Rodney said, raising an eyebrow at Monique and the two women flanking her, silent and patrician. "So you're Monique, are you? Hrm. I suppose I'll be able to do something with you."

Monique's mouth opened, a perfect 'O' of outrage drawn in expensive-looking lipstick, but before she had time to shriek, Rodney was clicking his fingers at her. "Come on, come on," he said, "Time's wasting and I've got exactly 47 minutes to go through place settings with you and explain why a pink butterfly-themed wedding is just not going to happen."

He set off for the larger of the function suites at a fast clip, Monique and retinue trailing after him. The three of them looked faintly stunned; John had grown used to seeing those kinds of expressions on people's faces. He was pretty sure Rodney was the only wedding co-ordinator in New York City who not only arranged the wedding, but the brides, too.

***

The Atlantis Hotel had been built in the 1920s—a tall building of carved, silvery stone whose gilded spires had echoed with the music of the Jazz Age, glowed with the elegance of the Thirties, buzzed with the revived energy of the Forties. The post-war years had begun a long decline; while the Plaza and the Waldorf-Astoria had continued to play host to society galas, a succession of apathetic owners had left the Atlantis languishing, lost, a mid-town relic of its former glory. By the mid-nineties, it was shabby and rundown, close to bankruptcy, but the new owners—Sam Carter and her partner, Elizabeth Weir—had used determination and drive to turn shabby into shabby-chic, and from there it was only a short step to bohemian, and a hop to hipster-cool.

Or, as Rodney put it, "to installing a beacon for every moron with sub-par intelligence and daddy's money who has a vested interest in making my hairline recede even faster than I thought possible. Give me another Sam Adams, quick, if I think about Clara and her tacky-ass wedding favours for one more minute I'll give myself an aneurysm."

Ronon had slid another bottle across the bar to Rodney, as well as one to John; the bottle was cold and condensation-slick against the palm of his hand. It had been John's first week at the Atlantis, and he was feeling more than a little overwhelmed. Each individual task wasn't very complex, but trying to juggle them all at once made manning the reception desk a little overwhelming at times. He took a healthy swig from the bottle, swallowing slow; the beer was a welcome relief after a morning so long that his black uniform shirt was clinging to his sweaty back. More than that, it was nice just to sit—to relax back in one of the creaking leather bar stools that ringed the old-fashioned hotel bar, to have to do nothing more than listen to Rodney and Ronon mock the supposed merits of each other's grad programmes, and to wonder idly if he should go skateboarding on his day off, or just lie in bed and read.

"See?" Rodney was saying when John started to pay attention again, "That's my entire point! What on earth are you supposed to _do_ with an MBA from Columbia?"

"More than you're doing with your Masters in Theoretical Astrophysics and Engineering," Ronon said with a smirk. "Didn't know you needed to be an engineer to make wedding favours."

Rodney waved him off with a flick of his hand. "I've told you before, I'm ABD! This is just a, a sideline. A hobby, if you will."

Ronon grinned at John. "Drove his supervisor batty. Poor woman had to go live somewhere nice and q—"

"Now that is just a lie!" Rodney sputtered. "Professor Myerson is simply gone on sabbatical for a year, and I don't appreciate you telling people that I've driven three professors to—"

John really had to admire the perfection of Ronon's blank stare. "Don't know what you're talking about, McKay."

Rodney huffed in exasperation, knocked back the rest of his beer, and stood up. "I have suppliers to berate and a wedding theme to devise," he said, chin tilted in the air and very much on his dignity. "So if you'll excuse me?"

There was a slight altercation at the door of the bar, where he almost knocked over an elderly guest, and her tiny chihuahua tried to nip at his ankles before he fled.

John turned back to Ronon and raised an eyebrow. "He _always_ like this?"

Ronon slowly polished a glass. "Yup."

John grinned down at his beer.

***

Ronon wasn't wrong: Rodney was brash and rude and tactless; a perfectionist who demanded nothing less than geometrically aligned place settings for all his gala events, and who didn't care how many of the wait staff he had to verbally abuse in order to achieve his goals; perennially grumpy, even after his sixth large Americano; forever disregarding the spending limits that Teyla, the financial manager, set for his division; his table manners in the staff dining room could be pretty disgusting, given that he was a wedding planner and all; and John had learned through painful (literally) experience that it was best to give McKay a wide berth when he was working on a paper and a new wedding brochure simultaneously. (Trying to wrestle Photoshop and LaTex into compliance at the same time and on three hours' sleep was apparently too much even for Rodney's brain.)

But here was the thing: John watched him all summer long, and Rodney was also funny, and loyal, and full of unexpected, awkward kindness. He was confident, quick, and intelligent enough to read through a draft of John's thesis and return it to him covered in Post Its and red pen (all of his corrections insightful and true and, John was sure, the work of many, many hours). He wasn't afraid to work, wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty—John once found him, the calm centre at the heart of a pre-wedding panic, kneeling on the restroom floor and fixing a leaking toilet, unheeding of the damage that was being done to his expensive suit—and if he took a perverse glee in jousting with bridezillas, well, he was also deft at coaxing along the most nervous and uncertain of brides.

He was also, like, a _magnet_ for any of the small, bored kids who got dragged along to family weddings. John had made print outs from the security cameras of what had happened during the afters of the Christensen wedding—a swarm of children dancing around Rodney, coaxing him to join in with them, before they toppled him to the ground and a flower girl sat triumphantly on his belly—and stuck them up on the notice board in the staff room. The succession of pictures formed a little tableau: John had called it 'McKay Defeated: or, Hubris Brought Low.'

"What?" Rodney said when he saw them, flapping his hands in the air; it was Monday morning and he was technically off duty, so Rodney was dressed in a worn-soft pair of old jeans, and a t-shirt that was a little too tight in the arms. "What, what, _what_ did I _ever_ do to deserve such hatred?"

John ducked his head, and grinned, and said, "Nah, Rodney. Don't hate you."

***

"See," Rodney had explained to him, round about his third or fourth week on the job, "the trick isn't to try to _forget_ the really stupid, inane and annoying things that people say to you. It's to revel in them."

John looked up at him from underneath his bangs. It had been a long, long night-time shift, filled with every single rich, eccentric kook that New York could manage to attract in an eight hour period, and all John was trying to do now was to imbibe enough caffeine so that he could get home before crashing. "What?"

"Yes, yes, I know," Rodney said, waving a hand at him, "You'd _think_ the logical thing to do would be to forget all about them, move on, leave their imbecility in the past, just as Darwinian selection will eventually leave _them_ in the dust. But you can't do that! Working in a hotel means that worked out on a monthly basis, you encounter far more simpletons than your average member of the population. I've worked it out. Scientifically."

"Uh huh," John said. If this was some bizarre attempt on Rodney's part to make him feel a little better, it was actually sort of working; he could feel a little smile playing around the corner of his mouth.

"What I do is get it all out of my system! I write it down in a list. You know, _Top 10 Moronic Things Said to Me This 25th Day of April. Why you Can't Have a Cher-Themed Wedding and Other Stories. Twenty Reasons Why I Will Never Organise a Wedding For You 'Just Like Martha Stewart Would'_. I find that recording evidence of other people's incompetence really helps me get the anger out of my system, and reassures me of my own intrinsic intelligence."

"I see," John said wryly.

"Yeah," Rodney said vaguely, sucking absent-mindedly on his spoon of apricot yoghurt. "Some day, maybe, I'll start my own blog. I could blog!"

John stared.

***

Oddly enough, John found that Rodney's technique actually worked.

Most of the time.

Not the time that a certain Hollywood tween starlet and a group of her sleep over friends decided that three in the morning was the ideal time to go sledding down the steps of the grand entrance staircase, riding on some of the service trays that they'd stolen from the kitchen.

John had to bribe a member of the paparazzi so that he didn't make the front cover of _People _ in a 'Tycoon's Wayward College Son in Underage Hijinks' scandal.

Since Rodney and Ronon lacked souls and had access to Photoshop, however, John got to see what it would have looked like, anyway.

***

None of the receptionists were supposed to give out Rodney's personal cell number to anyone—not for any reason, not at any time.

"Not even," Rodney declared grandly, "if the pope himself were to call."

John wrinkled his nose in mock confusion. "I thought you were raised Presbyterian?"

"Shut up," Rodney said, and hit John upside the head. "I mean it."

Later that evening, when the day's check-ins were done and the swirl of people through the lobby was starting to lessen, John got a call on the switchboard that made him frown, then sit up straighter and grin. "His name's actually _what_? Yeah, sure, no problem, Ms Miller. I can transfer you straight to his personal number."

If that call did end up on loudspeaker in the receptionists' office—well, John had no idea how.

***

Rodney got very, very excited when they managed to lure Jennifer Keller away from the Waldorf-Astoria—he used words like _patissier_ and _prodigy_ and _croquembouche_ and _the best thing to happen to Atlantis in, oh, ever; or at least since me_; and John was just starting to work up the energy to fuel a good old bout of jealousy when he actually got to meet her. Not only was Jennifer cute and funny and friendly, but she was nursing an enormous, instantaneous—and mutual—crush on Ronon, and she was clearly a pastry chef worth the enormous salary the Atlantis was giving her.

Rodney managed to wheedle a box of sample pastries out of her—when faced with mounds of choux pastry, it seemed, Rodney was capable of politeness—and ambushed John on his way out of the morning shift. "You busy?" he asked.

"Uh," John said. He'd been planning on going home, doing some laundry—the only clothes he had clean were a change of uniform, two pairs of boxers and an old band t-shirt; there were some things he regretted about this whole don't-live-in-dad's-enormous-mansion thing, and 24 hour laundry service was one of them—and then maybe cleaning his golf clubs. He had a feeling that wouldn't sound so great if he said it to Rodney. "Nope."

"Come on, then," Rodney said over his shoulder, impatient and already heading for the lifts, "I'm waiting."

John squared his shoulders—terribly aware, as he did so, of the quiet snickering that was coming from behind the reception desk, where Amelia and Radek were just starting the afternoon shift; he wished them a hundred angry guests, complaining about housekeeping, and a complete crash in the check-in system—and followed.

They went up onto the section of roof that opened off one of the emergency doors. Most of the Atlantis' roof was spires and statuary, but this little patch was flat and square, tiled in a blue-grey slate. It was rarely used, save for when Elizabeth relapsed into smoking and thought she could come up here without Sam finding out, and right now it was just the two of them: John sitting with his feet propped up on the back of a pouncing stone gargoyle; Rodney listing at his side, valiantly fighting off the worst of a sugar-induced coma in an attempt to consume just one final eclair.

"You're kind of gross, you know that?" John told him. Not that he had much grounds for smugness, himself: he'd eaten about six glazed tarts full to bursting of fresh summer berries, and some pastry that Rodney had told him was Turkish, which made John moan when he took his first bite.

"If I died right now," Rodney said, words a little muffled by the finger he had in his mouth; he was sucking off the last of the blackberry jam, "I would die a happy man." He pulled the finger out with a wet noise, and the fact that John was able to refrain from closing his eyes or screaming out loud or doing something _really_ stupid and pouncing on Rodney was little short of a miracle. "I mean, obviously," Rodney continued on obliviously, "I would die leaving my PhD unfinished, three epic summer weddings incomplete, _and_ I'd never get that Nobel because of that whole _issue_ the committee has with awarding it to people posthumously. But, you know. Basically content."

"Death by sugar coma would leave you _basically content_?"

"Well." Rodney cracked one eye open and looked up at him; this close, his eyes were very blue. "I wouldn't be so enthralled by the death part, I think that goes without saying. But it's a Thursday afternoon, the weather is good, we're at the optimal place in New York for watching city life—"

"Couple hundred feet off the ground with no view of the street?"

"Exactly. No people to interrupt my appreciation of the bustle of city life. Add that to a new journal article I'll have coming out next week, which should do some very satisfying things to the ego of that moron Kavanagh; the very large cheque one of the Kennedy clan just wrote me for a wedding deposit; the fact that the best pastry chef on the east coast is now mine to command... I mean, all that, and. Well."

John looked down. Anything that would cause a stutter in the flow of Rodney's words was sure-fire cause for concern. "And?"

Rodney's cheeks flushed pink; so did, John was fascinated to see, the tips of his ears. "And, well. You know, the company isn't half bad."

John raised an eyebrow and tried to stop the grin that wanted to spread across his face. "That's really high praise, Rodney, thanks," he said, putting every single ounce of Virginia-raised lassitude that he could muster into his drawl.

"That's not—I mean—what I was implying—it's not that I _don't not_ think that you're—but if you were just—so really." Rodney's hands sketched out something elaborate and possibly four-dimensional in the air. "Isn't it _obvious_?" he finished, frustrated and flushed and, John suspected, quite close to an aneurysm.

It was kind of obvious, if you'd been watching Rodney for a while; but watching Rodney get this worked up was kind of fun, and John had no intention of giving in any time soon. He wrinkled up his nose and cocked his head to one side. "Nah," he said, as if he were really considering it. "Not really."

"Oh for the love of Elrond," Rodney said, and grabbed John by the ears and kissed him.

John had thought about this a lot: what it would be like to kiss Rodney, be kissed by him; to rumple the crisp, starched lines of Rodney's shirts; to feel Rodney turn pliant against him as his words trailed off and his breathing grew harsher. He'd wondered if it was just a summer's madness that was the cause of it; if sitting still at the centre of it all while people ebbed and flowed, came and went, around him was what drew him to Rodney, to all the kinetic and the potential energy; if the autumn's return to normalcy, to everything that Rodney _wasn't_, would cure him of this need to feel the rasp of Rodney's stubble against his skin.

Rodney leaned into him, trusting, and let John turn the kiss deeper, hotter; let John's fingers skim over the line of his belly; and if this was madness, John thought, if this was nothing he was ever supposed to want, the _shoulds_ and the _supposeds to_ of his life had already shown themselves not to be worth very much at all. This was _Rodney_, and he was kissing John back with focus and care, and god, so much affection, here on a New York rooftop in the heart of summer—and when Rodney pulled back, panting, just a little, John grinned without opening his eyes and said, "Oh, _that's_ what you meant?"

"No," Rodney said dryly, his forehead resting against John's, "absolutely not. What I meant was, _why on earth do I, as brilliant as I am, put up with a knock-kneed, pointy-eared, wooly-headed_—"

"Because," John interrupted him softly, "you like me."

"Well," Rodney said, "there is that," and kissed him again.


End file.
